GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost review -
Reference technology and specs

Reference technology and specs

So as always we'll first address the reference technology first. A reference product is a board designed by NVIDIA in this case, it's the baseline template. A product like tested today is always based of the reference design and sometimes optimized a little in terms of VRM, PCB design, component usage, clock frequencies, cooling and display outputs. But the building template the manufacturers work from is in fact that reference design.

In this segment of the article we will look at the reference (original design) based specs and architecture. The GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost is based on the Kepler GPU architecture. The product is using the GK106 which is based on a 28nm fabrication process. You guys all know the GK106 from the GeForce GTX 660 products. That chip has 2.64 Billion transistors.

Now try to follow this:

There is that regular GeForce GTX 650, and then ...

The GeForce GTX 650 Ti is 40% faster than the GTX 650 on average.

The GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost is 40% faster than the GTX 650 Ti on average

768 Shader processors on the Ti series

When we peek at NVIDIA's slide decks we see them denoting that the GeForce GTX 650 Ti series has been designed for 1080p gaming with medium settings and FXAA. That's true but please do understand this remains a budget level graphics card .

You'll notice that the TDP of the card is a notch higher, a maximum of 140 watts, however since a segment of the GPU is not used the realistic power consumption will be a tad lower. We measured that to be roughly 135 Watts. The GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost ships with an external 6-pin power connector. This power connector provides additional headroom for overclocking as well. Many GeForce GTX 650 Ti and Boost edition boards are capable of hitting speeds in excess of 1100 MHz quite easily. The idle power of GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost is 5W to 10W representing good in class idle power. In addition, HD video playable is ~13W, again representing best in class power consumption.

Display outputs include two dual-link DVI one Display Port and one HDMI connector, however this could be different per board partner.

192-bit Memory Interface

The memory subsystem of the GeForce GTX 650 Ti consisted out of two 64-bit memory controllers in use (128-bit) with either 1GB or 2GB of GDDR5 memory. The Boost edition is getting a nice upgrade, three 64-bit memory controllers are in use offering a 192-bit wide memory bus. And that translates into 144 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. That's pretty sweet actually.

Another change is the ROP (raster operation) engine, this was 16 units and now is 24 similar like it's bigger brother the GeForce GTX 660. The new graphics adapters are of course DirectX 11.1 ready, and that means advantages like DirectCompute, multi-threading, hardware tessellation and the latest shader 5.0 extensions. For your reference here's a quick overview of some of the more recent graphics cards.

GeForce GTX 650

GeForce GTX 650 Ti

GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost

GeForce GTX 660

GeForce GTX 660 Ti

GeForce GTX 670

GeForce GTX 680

GeForce GTX 690

Stream (Shader) Processors

384

768

768

960

1344

1344

1536

3072

Core Clock (MHz)

1058

925

980

980

915

915

1006

915

Shader Clock (MHz)

1058

925

-

-

-

-

-

-

Boost clock (Mhz)

-

-

1033

1033

980

980

1058

1019

Memory Clock (effective MHz)

5000

5400

6008

6008

6008

6008

6008

6008

Memory amount

<2048

<2048

2048

2048

2048

2048

2048

4096

Memory Interface

128-bit

128-bit

192-bit

192-bit

192-bit

256-bit

256-bit

256-bit

Memory Type

GDDR5

GDDR5

GDDR5

GDDR5

GDDR5

GDDR5

GDDR5

GDDR5

For Kepler, NVIDIA kept their memory controllers GDDR5 compatible. Memory wise NVIDIA offers nice large memory volumes due to their architecture, we pass 2 GB as standard these days for most of NVIDIA's series 600 graphics cards in the high range spectrum. We expect most GTX 650 Ti Boost cards to come with 2 GB of video memory.